Tuesday, May 26, 2015

Out-of-Town-Authors: Guy Gavriel Kay II

A little over 30 years ago, Guy Gavriel Kay published his first fantasy novel, The Summer Tree. Since that time, the former Winnipegger has published 11 more novels.

On Friday, Kay will return to the city to give the
Writers' Trust of Canada-sponsored Margaret Laurence Lecture at the
University of Winnipeg's Eckhardt-Gramatté Hall.

The Toronto-based Kay recently took the time to discuss
the changes to the city—and to his writing—over those three
decades.

Q: Has your process changed enormously the 30 years
you've been writing? I'm thinking specifically about the amount of
research required to write "history with a quarter-turn to the
fantastic," as your recent work has been labelled, versus the high
fantasy of the Finovar Tapestry...

A: Yes, the migration towards historically based or
driven work does require a great deal of research, slows me down, though
I am aware that my readers worldwide allow me that luxury of being able
to go slower, write at the speed that feels like I am closer to doing
justice to the story I want to tell. I'll add that the research phase is
by far my favourite: I'm just learning things, interacting with very
smart scholars—and I don't have "responsibilities" till that evil
moment when I know it is time to start writing!

Q: You've gone from fan letters sent to your publisher
to readers tweeting at you. What's changed in terms of how you engage
with readers, over the three decades that you've been writing?

A: That one needs an essay! There is enormous complexity
to a cultural age where we are so readily and easily in contact with
artists whose work we admire (or hate, sometimes!). The idea of the
author as his or her own "marketing director" is a new one, puts a lot
of stress on young writers, and has absolutely changed the process, as
you suggest. James Joyce spoke of "silence" as part of what a writer
needed. That can get harder and harder to find.

Q: How do you think you wound up as a fiction writer,
despite training as a lawyer, despite your early forays into TV and
journalism? Did growing up in
impatient/activist/practical/arty/small-town/fantastical Winnipeg have
anything to do with it?

A: Winnipeg, for me and my peers, was a source of
tremendous energy. In Toronto, at the CBC where I was involved for some
years at the beginning of my career, the idea of "the Winnipeg mafia"
was a given. This city made a lot of us driven and ambitious. Something
in the water and the air, the city "punching above its weight" in terms
of the national culture. My honest answer when I started would have been
that I expected to practise law and try hard to find time around that
to write a little. Every author who is able to make a living, work
full-time at fiction (it can't even be imagined for poetry or short
stories), needs to be profoundly aware of good fortune that this is so. I
am.

Q: Speaking of poetry, tell me about the last poem you wrote.

A: I started with poetry (at Grant Park High and U of M)
and I still write it. The shift over the years and decades is that for
the most part the poems are for myself—everything else, just about,
is for readers. The poetry isn't always.

Q: Tell me a bit about your Winnipeg. What burns brightest from your childhood? What is your latest discovery?

A: Another essay! I have only good memories of Winnipeg,
and a great deal still burns brightly, from various hockey rinks (frozen
toes burn!) to Assiniboine Park to campus lounges to Junior's hamburger
stand by the train station. Every time I come back it is, as the sage
Yogi Berra said, "déj vu all over again." The new thing? What comes to
mind is food—this is now a seriously good dining city! That's so
despite the heartbreaking loss of Kelekis. Not sure I'll forgive anyone
for letting that happen.

* * *

So this is the second interview I've done with GGK for my Out of Town Authors column. Which is great fun, especially considering how I cried over The Finovar Tapestry in my twenties.

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me me me

Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer. Her second collection of poetry, Stowaways, won the 2015 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry. When not being bookish, Ariel likes tromping through the woods and taking macro photographs of mushrooms.

Stowaways

Praise for Stowaways

Winner of the 2015 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry / Prix Lansdowne de Poesie at the Manitoba Book Awards.

"Stowaways is well imagined and well crafted, each poem tight, the poet’s attention evident. From wildlife to the clutter of the everyday to “how-to” offerings, the reader is charmed and enticed by the poet’s light touch and sure pen. Images jump out at us, grab us by the throat, leave us gasping. Ariel Gordon’s second collection is as strong as the parts of its sum.” —Margaret Michele Cook, Katia Grubisic, and Paul Savoie, judges of the 2015 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry.

"Stowaways is a clever and often hilarious collection with itsoccasional tenderness let slip amidst a clearly unromantic stance and matter-of-fact prairie landscape. With its freshness of metaphor and crazy juxtapositions, its ironic and often comic twists in narrative, Stowaways is a collection that will hold readers' eyes and play with their wits to the end."—Gillian Harding-Russell, The Goose.

"Though the cover copy promises poems that are 'smart and gorgeously funny' — and they do have those qualities — Ariel Gordon’s voice is more than that. Sometimes within a single poem, she gives us laugh-out-loud humour followed by a poignant smack across the head." —Kimmy Beach, Canadian Poetries.

"In the closing poem of Stowaways, the surviving pilot of the first fatal plane crash in recorded history receives a small box of debris from the calamity, 'to amuse him in his convalescence.' What a fitting figure for this collection's loopy juxtapositions and serious surprises. The world in Ariel Gordon's poems is one in which everything and everyone, from a sleep-starved human mother to a miscegenational beluga, is simultaneously endangered and dangerous. If Gordon understands our vulnerability, how 'skin is a thin shield,' that even a birthday balloon, drifting from the back seat is 'a kiss with teeth,' she vividly reminds us that those teeth are ours: 'If I had had twins,' says the new mother in "Primpara," "I would have eaten one.' These are nervy poems that refuse to behave themselves. They are something to celebrate." —Julie Bruck

Hump

Praise for Hump

Winner of the 2011 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry / Prix Lansdowne de Poesie at the Manitoba Book Awards.

"The focus of Hump is the rich experience of motherhood and marriage on the one hand, and of city life in the integrated context of the natural world, which is everywhere engaging, fierce, beautiful, and unstoppable. This is capable, exuberant writing, at once passionate and meticulous. Hump is a worthy first book indeed." —Michael Harris, Kenneth Meadwell, and Serge Patrice Thibodeau, jurors for the 2011 Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry.

“Ariel Gordon is superbly, supremely, a poet of the body. She finds words for the physicality of the forest, of the garden, of pregnancy. Hump speaks the erotics of being alive and being in love with being alive.” —Robert Kroetsch.

"Brimming with finely crafted poems that thrum with life and love, Hump is indeed a very promising debut." —Fiona Timwei Lam, Contemporary Verse 2.

“Not so much sweetness and light, Gordon channels Adrienne Rich's dichotomy of love and frustration with her realism.” —Zanna Joyce, Winnipeg Free Press.

"If you don't know Ariel's work, I can recommend her book Hump, which I keep on my bedside table, along with all my stuff on LOST EXPLORERS and CASTAWAYS and HELLISH SIEGES, as things to pick up and simply open and starting reading anywhere, which is the pretty much the best review a book can get." —Darryl Joel Berger.

"The beauty of this collection is the love of the mother for her child, that relationship that the childfree will never experience. But the beauty is hidden slyly in the gorgeous lines that free themselves when needed from the details of the grime, the blood, the leaking breasts, and the mundane sleeplessness of parenting-turned poetry." —Kimmy Beach, Canadian Poetries

“Hump is gentle and sly, but also as sharp as baby teeth and poison mushrooms. And it’s called Hump.” —Quentin Mills-Fenn, Uptown Magazine.

Origin Story

Why is my name Ariel Gordon and this blog entitled The Jane Day Reader, you ask?

Well, my middle names are Jane and Day, after my grandmothers, Ade Augusta Rooseboom (who was called Day Laban after she married my grandfather and moved to Canada) and Anna Vida Mary Barrett-Hamilton (who became Jane Gordon after her immigration and later marriage).

When I was fourteen, I seriously contemplated using "Jane Day Gordon" or "J.D. Gordon" as my pen name. And then realized that there was no point in having an alternate identity in no-degrees-of-separation Winnipeg.

As a grown-up compromise, I started using 'janeday' as the username for my email and then for the name of this blog, which I started reluctantly and never expected to enjoy...

(I also gave my daughter another version of my grandmothers' names...)